The text of COG's proposed constitutional amendment contains far more words than the 10 amendments of the Bill of Rights and is a Rube Goldberg-like plan. COG would require each House and Senate member to designate in advance three to seven successors to fill his seat if it becomes vacant, and the governor from their state would appoint representatives from among those designates.
Each House and Senate member would be empowered to "revise the designations" of his successors at any time. Thus, in the 2004 elections, voters would be given the task of electing a congressional candidate to whom is attached several shadows who would fade in and out of the possibility of serving in Congress and whose actual appointment would depend on a governor's choice.
Each governor's "appointment authority" would kick in after a majority of governors issued a proclamation that an "emergency" exists because a majority of the representatives in that state are dead or "unable to discharge" their duties. The process gets stickier if the disabled representative rises from his sick bed and tries to resume the office to which he was legitimately elected.
James Madison did a better job of writing the Constitution than COG, whose members include Donna Shalala, Lynn Martin, Kweisi Mfume, Tom Foley and Newt Gingrich. The Constitution of the United States already allows governors to fill U.S. Senate vacancies and allows states to advance their timetables for special House elections.
COG's co-chairman is Lloyd Cutler, confidant of Presidents Carter and Clinton, who was also co-chairman of the 1983 Committee on the Constitutional System that tried unsuccessfully to change the U.S. Constitution in a dozen ways in order to eliminate our separation of powers.
A co-sponsor of COG is the Brookings Institution, whose president, Strobe Talbott, was Clinton's foreign policy adviser. Talbott famously wrote in Time Magazine that "nationhood as we know it will be obsolete" and that he rejoiced in the coming "birth of the Global Nation."
The United States survived the real national emergencies of the Civil War and the burning of the U.S. Capitol by the British in 1814 without Americans giving up their right to elect members of the U.S. House of Representatives. We should never relinquish that right.